That old Tom Petty song, “The Waiting is the Hardest Part,” keeps running through my mind. Four of my friends are waiting to hear the results of medical tests taken last week.

Lucas has exhausted all of the standard cancer therapies for rectal cancer and is waiting to hear if he is a candidate for any experimental treatments.

Sam, who has lived through aggressive treatment for multiple cancers, is waiting to hear results from a test that will tell him if the fact that he is so very, very sick is due to one of them recurring.

Lucy just had major abdominal surgery and is waiting to hear the results of the pathology report that will determine whether or not her cancer can be treated at all.

Phil, who has been in remission from two different leukemias, had Read more »

Patients are starting to bill doctors for making them wait, reports CNN.

“When he keeps patients waiting more than 15 minutes, Dr. Timothy Malia, a primary care physician in Fairport, New York, hands them a $5 bill. If patients in Eugene, Oregon, wait more than 10 minutes to see Dr. Pamela Wible, they receive a handmade soap or a bottle of lotion. When Dr. Cyrus Peikari, an internist in Dallas, recently had to miss a day of work because of a family emergency, he gave the patients whose appointments he canceled $50 at their next appointment.”

I’ve been kept waiting at doctors’ offices. I’ve been kept waiting as pharma reps walked past a full waiting room bearing plates of food. But I’ve also been kept waiting as doctors have handled other patients, undoubtedly more complex cases than mine.

Practice administrator and blogger Brandon Betancourt sums up the point nicely, and further extends the idea to every delay faced in life, such as toll booths on turpikes tied up with traffic.

I’ve also been squeezed into the schedule for emergency appointments, undoubtedly making someone else wait. And I’ve also been treated by phone on nights, weekends and holidays, and I’m not so sure that my primary care physician gets reimbursed for that.

So, kudos to those few physicians who respect their patients’ busy schedules enough to reward them. But I’m Read more »

Google Ad S1

Google Ad S2

Google Ad S3

Google Ad S4

Google Ad S5

Latest Interviews

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Latest Cartoon

Latest Book Reviews

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…